Community Meeting Recap
July 11, 2020
We invite you to soak in the community milestones we've marked together, carefully read budget updates that describe how we are aligning our collective resources with our values and how we can each resource our community to continue growing, and learn about longer-term financial planning.
Multimedia
See the meeting slides | Hear the audio recording | Read the attendee chat
Milestones, Life Events, Kadima's Continued Unfolding
Leadership! Calling YOU!
We are looking to expand the leadership of the board with Roshei Beitim (heads of houses, or point-people for areas of Kadima's work). Beitim include:
Budget 2020
Aligning Our Collective Resources With Our Values
By dedicating ourselves to appropriate salaries and benefits within our community, by continuing to grow and evolve Kadima School and youth programming, and by dedicating funds for internal disability justice and anti-racism work, we have necessarily increased our budget this year by $100,000 over the 2019-2020 fiscal year. We are so excited about all that we can do together this year as we align our practice more closely with our values!
Each level is named after a radical Jewish person from history or our ritual texts! Find their biographies at https://tinyurl.com/nadivlev-bios and stay tuned to the weekly newsletter to celebrate each namesake!As you can see, we can easily hit our goal of around $200,000 per year while still allowing for a wide spread of accessible contributions. To make sure Kadima remains accessible, each of us must give according to our ability.
Click here to begin or increase your Nadiv Lev!
HINT: From the “I am” drop-down menu in the middle of the page, select “A Current Member, updating my Nadiv Lev pledge.
Levels are suggested! You may give more than the highest level, and anywhere in between levels. More households giving at higher levels allows us maximum flexibility to accommodate households at the Kehilah level.
We invite you to give at about 1.5%-2% of your household income, but you may calculate your dues however works best for you.
Kadima School Contributions & the BudgetThroughout much of Kadima’s past, the school has used a fee-for-service model. This made sense for a long time - Kadima School *was* Kadima for most of our history, and made up the largest portion of Kadima’s programming. While Kadima’s programming has grown substantially outside of the school, our school still functions using an exclusively fee-for-service model, and school tuition is subsidizing other parts of Kadima’s budget.
The board is committed to continuing to align our budget with our values of tzedakah and communal responsibility. As one way of doing that, we are now ready to move toward sharing the support for all aspects of Kadima’s programming - including the Jewish learning of our youth and families - more broadly across all members. In other words, the Board is committed to shifting toward a model in which contributions for school would supplement a substantial foundation provided by ALL members.
For the coming year, we would like to take one step toward this goal by shifting our income streams. We would ask school families to locate themselves on the NL scale just as any other member household. Between 40 and 70% of school funding would be drawn from monthly accessible dues contributions from all households. We would ask for an additional “supplemental school contribution” that would make up the remainder (30-60%) of funding needed for school. For school families who are able, this would mean making monthly Nadiv Lev contributions that maintain or increase total giving so we can offer a more accessible school contribution rate while funding our overall larger budget.
Ultimately, we want each member and household in our community to have a role in the whole community thriving and to have access to the parts of our community that work for each of us at different times in our lives.
This is where you come in! We need to know if we have your support to make this values-aligned shift.
Especially during the pandemic, we hope that our community will see the benefit of shifting the way we allocate funds across our organization-wide budget to allow for more flexibility in our programming needs. If we are all supporting our entire community’s functioning through Nadiv Lev, Accessible Dues, we are able to be responsive and adaptive in how we offer opportunities for engagement community-wide.It takes all of us to build this sanctuary.
Regardless of how we gather our resources, we are each needed to make sure we have the resources necessary to sustain & grow our community.
Board members will be calling each and every household to discuss membership contributions between now and the High Holidays.
Click here to begin or increase your Nadiv Lev!
Longer-Term Financial Planning
Along with the board’s work in financial planning, we are collaborating with a brilliant Financial Strategic Planning Team - a group of members who have graciously assembled to help us make adjustments to how we collect our resources starting next year and moving forward. The team is hard at work evaluating membership models and assessing alignment with our values and feasibility for meeting our budget.
The board is committed to this collaborative work, and we hope that this year’s potential shift in resource allocation will set the team up to dream big for the future. You will hear from the team soon with additional questions that will help inform planning.
Stay tuned, and make sure to give us your opinion in an upcoming survey so we can all move forward together. There will also be future opportunities to give input through individual or small-group conversations.
L'Chaim, L'Shalom, L'Tzedek
Lastly, and most importantly, we appreciate everyone in our community right now in all the many ways you are able to resource or growing, unfurling community. Whether you are providing food delivery to other community members via Mutual Aid Kadima, checking in on members as part of team Yitro (or responding to their calls), leading and fundraising with Seattle Young Jews for Justice, creating and attending space for learning and healing, coming together to light candles for Zoom shabbos and Virtshul, or participating in upcoming #DefundSPD education events. We value our togetherness.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] or [email protected] with questions, concerns, other input, or enthusiasm to join in our leadership to whatever extent possible!
l'chaim, l'shalom, l'tzedek
Kadima Board of Directors
Julianna Alson and Rachel Bender Ignacio (Co-Presidents)
Sima Kahn (Vice President)
Doug Brown (Treasurer)
Kim Berman (Secretary)
Andy Gordon
Multimedia
See the meeting slides | Hear the audio recording | Read the attendee chat
Milestones, Life Events, Kadima's Continued Unfolding
- We last met in person for Heart & Chutzpah 5780, an energizing evening that brought in over $53,000 for our community!
- Since then, we have celebrated several b’mitzvahs, births, and weddings, and gathered together virtually in so many ways to support each other as a community in spite of and because of the pandemic.
- Rabbi David signed a 10 year contract to continue to lead us until 2030! This contract brings RDB up to approximate salary parity with rabbinical colleagues within 3 years.
- Continuing our dedication to labor justice within our own virtual walls, we are bringing our salaried staff (Mollie and Morgan) up to approximate salary parity with peers at local congregations.
- We welcome Morgan and Mollie into new roles of Director of Operations and Director of Youth & Family Learning. These titles honor the work these two already do and establish a Co-Directorship with Rabbi David.
- For the first time, we are providing health benefits for all salaried staff!
- We became the fiscal sponsor for a rabbinical student who is supporting JOC Havurot nationwide with the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative.
- We have shown up for & signed-on to DefundSPD, End the Deadly Exchange Seattle, Not Free to Desist, and Pass the Green New Deal WA-based coalition urging the passage of a national green new deal.
- After releasing an RFP last winter, we identified a consultant who will work with us to advance our equity and inclusion work (tikkun kehilah).
- We launched our first teen summer organizing institute, TIRDOF, as part of our exciting newly named (by the young folks themselves!) teen program, Seattle Young Jews for Justice
Leadership! Calling YOU!
We are looking to expand the leadership of the board with Roshei Beitim (heads of houses, or point-people for areas of Kadima's work). Beitim include:
- Limmud (adult, youth, and family learning)
- Avodah / Gabbai (ritual and liturgy, holidays, spiritual learning)
- Hadracha (leadership: president(s), secretary, treasurer)
- Tikkun Olam (social justice: engagement with movements for justice and moving our own community toward equity, inclusion, and justice)
- Kehilah (community: membership engagement and outreach)
Budget 2020
Aligning Our Collective Resources With Our Values
By dedicating ourselves to appropriate salaries and benefits within our community, by continuing to grow and evolve Kadima School and youth programming, and by dedicating funds for internal disability justice and anti-racism work, we have necessarily increased our budget this year by $100,000 over the 2019-2020 fiscal year. We are so excited about all that we can do together this year as we align our practice more closely with our values!
- Our 2020-2021 budget: 70% of this budget goes directly toward personnel (see above: pay parity! Health insurance, finally!) See the full, exciting budget here.
- How we collect resources: Our dues structure since 2016 has been $36/member/year + Nadiv Lev
- Nadiv Lev (NL) is meant to be an accessible dues structure that allows us to both be inclusive and gives us some predictability about our available resources because of monthly pledges.
- There has been some confusion: We have heard that it has not been clear that we expect as many people to contribute monthly as possible.Yet, most of our community is giving generously in other ways. Shifting to giving through Nadiv Lev helps the Board and Staff predict our resources and helps each of us anticipate our fundraising needs.
- If all member households paid the same amount, each household would be asked to give roughly $2,100/year, or $175/month. However, we know that we all have different resources to give to our community.
- Updated framework for collective resources: In this context, and based on input from many of you in a recent survey, we developed suggested giving levels and the distribution of households needed to reach our goal.
Each level is named after a radical Jewish person from history or our ritual texts! Find their biographies at https://tinyurl.com/nadivlev-bios and stay tuned to the weekly newsletter to celebrate each namesake!As you can see, we can easily hit our goal of around $200,000 per year while still allowing for a wide spread of accessible contributions. To make sure Kadima remains accessible, each of us must give according to our ability.
Click here to begin or increase your Nadiv Lev!
HINT: From the “I am” drop-down menu in the middle of the page, select “A Current Member, updating my Nadiv Lev pledge.
Levels are suggested! You may give more than the highest level, and anywhere in between levels. More households giving at higher levels allows us maximum flexibility to accommodate households at the Kehilah level.
We invite you to give at about 1.5%-2% of your household income, but you may calculate your dues however works best for you.
Kadima School Contributions & the BudgetThroughout much of Kadima’s past, the school has used a fee-for-service model. This made sense for a long time - Kadima School *was* Kadima for most of our history, and made up the largest portion of Kadima’s programming. While Kadima’s programming has grown substantially outside of the school, our school still functions using an exclusively fee-for-service model, and school tuition is subsidizing other parts of Kadima’s budget.
The board is committed to continuing to align our budget with our values of tzedakah and communal responsibility. As one way of doing that, we are now ready to move toward sharing the support for all aspects of Kadima’s programming - including the Jewish learning of our youth and families - more broadly across all members. In other words, the Board is committed to shifting toward a model in which contributions for school would supplement a substantial foundation provided by ALL members.
For the coming year, we would like to take one step toward this goal by shifting our income streams. We would ask school families to locate themselves on the NL scale just as any other member household. Between 40 and 70% of school funding would be drawn from monthly accessible dues contributions from all households. We would ask for an additional “supplemental school contribution” that would make up the remainder (30-60%) of funding needed for school. For school families who are able, this would mean making monthly Nadiv Lev contributions that maintain or increase total giving so we can offer a more accessible school contribution rate while funding our overall larger budget.
Ultimately, we want each member and household in our community to have a role in the whole community thriving and to have access to the parts of our community that work for each of us at different times in our lives.
This is where you come in! We need to know if we have your support to make this values-aligned shift.
Especially during the pandemic, we hope that our community will see the benefit of shifting the way we allocate funds across our organization-wide budget to allow for more flexibility in our programming needs. If we are all supporting our entire community’s functioning through Nadiv Lev, Accessible Dues, we are able to be responsive and adaptive in how we offer opportunities for engagement community-wide.It takes all of us to build this sanctuary.
Regardless of how we gather our resources, we are each needed to make sure we have the resources necessary to sustain & grow our community.
Board members will be calling each and every household to discuss membership contributions between now and the High Holidays.
Click here to begin or increase your Nadiv Lev!
Longer-Term Financial Planning
Along with the board’s work in financial planning, we are collaborating with a brilliant Financial Strategic Planning Team - a group of members who have graciously assembled to help us make adjustments to how we collect our resources starting next year and moving forward. The team is hard at work evaluating membership models and assessing alignment with our values and feasibility for meeting our budget.
The board is committed to this collaborative work, and we hope that this year’s potential shift in resource allocation will set the team up to dream big for the future. You will hear from the team soon with additional questions that will help inform planning.
Stay tuned, and make sure to give us your opinion in an upcoming survey so we can all move forward together. There will also be future opportunities to give input through individual or small-group conversations.
L'Chaim, L'Shalom, L'Tzedek
Lastly, and most importantly, we appreciate everyone in our community right now in all the many ways you are able to resource or growing, unfurling community. Whether you are providing food delivery to other community members via Mutual Aid Kadima, checking in on members as part of team Yitro (or responding to their calls), leading and fundraising with Seattle Young Jews for Justice, creating and attending space for learning and healing, coming together to light candles for Zoom shabbos and Virtshul, or participating in upcoming #DefundSPD education events. We value our togetherness.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] or [email protected] with questions, concerns, other input, or enthusiasm to join in our leadership to whatever extent possible!
l'chaim, l'shalom, l'tzedek
Kadima Board of Directors
Julianna Alson and Rachel Bender Ignacio (Co-Presidents)
Sima Kahn (Vice President)
Doug Brown (Treasurer)
Kim Berman (Secretary)
Andy Gordon